Lengthy sales cycles are bad for everyone.
Modern customers get frustrated when they have to bend over backward to get the information they need to make the right decision. Sales reps feel defeated when they reach out to a customer only to find out they’re sticking to their old system or, worse, get no response. And both parties get tired of conflicting calendars making it difficult to schedule discovery calls and stretching out the entire process.
Maintaining deal momentum and working toward shorter sales cycles is essential to avoid these issues. But…more than half of companies are seeing longer sales cycles and cycle durations have expanded by over 50%. How do we reverse those trends? Let’s dive in.
What is the Sales Cycle?
The sales cycle is the collection of steps the sales and presales teams take in order to close new deals and sign new customers. It begins with research, moves through stages like qualifying and nurturing leads, and ends by overcoming objections and closing the deal.
Depending on your product and your unique sales process, your organization might average sales cycles that last just a few weeks—or some that last for years. For example, a retail store might have a sales cycle that only lasts minutes, while the average sales cycle for a B2B organization lands at around 100 days long and SaaS companies see sales cycles at an average of 84 days long.
Teams strive to shorten their sales cycles to stay efficient, quickly bring on new clients, and bring value to buyers ASAP.
Sales Cycle vs. Sales Funnel vs. Sales Process
The terms sales cycle, sales funnel, and sales process all describe a similar timeframe in the customer lifecycle, yet their definitions and uses differ in purpose and focus.
The sales cycle describes the time it takes for a new lead to turn into a closed sale. Why do we care? By improving an organization’s sales cycle, you can close more deals at faster rates—ultimately bringing in more revenue. There is generally an emphasis on timing and duration in conversations about the sales cycle.
The sales process is your organization’s workflow within the sales cycle. The process is built of the repeatable actions your marketing, presales, and sales teams follow with every lead—your replicable building blocks, if you will. With those tried and true blocks, you can create a strategic sales process and a consistent progression from leads to customers.
Finally, the sales funnel functions as a visual representation of the customer journey. The top, largest section of the funnel represents the leads who might click on an ad or find your product via search engines or social media. Leads move through the funnel, passing various dropoff points to form the progressively thinner shape: Some click your ad but don’t sign up for your email list, for example.
Leads who continue to complete further steps of your sales process (such as interacting with demos or booking discovery calls) make it to the bottom, thinnest section of the funnel. That’s where they engage in sales calls, learn more about your offer, and eventually (ideally) convert!
Sales Cycle Stages
Understanding the stages of the sales cycle helps you identify bottlenecks, push toward a shorter, more efficient sales cycle, and in turn, close more deals. Knowledge is power, so become that sales cycle expert and get closing!
Conducting Research
The first step in the sales cycle is to carry out thorough research to get to know your target buyers. When you can anticipate objections, pain points, needs, and vocabulary of your ideal customers, you’re more likely to nurture leads effectively and close deals more consistently.
Depending on your niche, conducting research might involve joining social media groups to read through the common questions and discussions, making online searches about topics your key customers might dig into, hosting focus groups to hear from them directly, or attending networking events to pick up on trending subjects. The research phase never really ends, since you’ll continue to learn about your buyers through the rest of the sales cycle (and beyond!).
Prospecting
Once you have a solid understanding of your target customers, it’s time to find them! Prospecting is the process of finding potential buyers. This can take place through a variety of channels and tools, and each business type and niche has its own ideal prospecting strategies. Through databases, online searches, and even social media, sales teams can develop a healthy list of new leads who might benefit from their product.
Qualifying Leads
Before you move into later phases that might require hands-on attention and follow-up, make sure you’re investing time in a lead that can truly benefit from your solution. A qualified lead has a need for your solution, the budget to afford it, and the authority within their organization to invest in it.
Depending on your unique offer, determine the other qualifications your leads need to meet, like appropriate capacity on their team, schedule alignment, and ideal integrations.
Nurturing
Once you’ve qualified a lead as a great fit for your solution, it’s time to guide them in learning about your product. There are many possible approaches for nurturing leads, from offering free trials to offering interactive demos.
One of the best ways to nurture leads is with automated demos, which are demos that don’t require your sales or pre-sales team to meet with your buyers live. Providing interactive demos through platforms like Consensus can lead to 2X more deals closed and a 30% faster sales cycle. That’s because they allow for smoother customer education, stronger buyer enablement, and more effective sharing opportunities within your buyers’ organizations.
An automated, interactive demo allows your buyer to experience your product firsthand, on their own schedule. They can easily share that demo with stakeholders—quickly becoming your well-equipped, internal champion.
Sending Proposals
Now that your buyer has seen firsthand how valuable your product can be, it’s time to send your proposal. A proposal outlines the details of a potential partnership, including:
- Your pricing tiers with details on what each tier includes
- Your suggested solution based on what you’ve learned about your buyer
- A detailed implementation plan
- An overview of your support and maintenance process
- A problem statement that clearly outlines the pain points your product will solve
With a proposal in hand, your buyer should have a thorough understanding of the exact value you offer and how much your solution will cost them.
Overcoming Objections
While some buyers will be ready to sign on as soon as they’ve experienced a demo and viewed the proposal, others may need to talk through their concerns, questions, and objections before making a final decision.
Your initial research can help guide you in handling those objections in a way that resonates with your buyer. The goal is to address your buyer’s concerns by illustrating how your product is the best solution for them, and the right investment to help them reach their goals.
Closing The Deal
You did it! With all objections tackled, it’s time to go in for the close. No deal is complete until contracts have been signed and payments are made. If there are additional questions you need to answer or negotiations that need to take place, address these steps quickly so that you can complete the deal and move out of the sales cycle and into onboarding.
How to Shorten Your Sales Cycle
Shortening your sales cycle means adding efficiency to your sales team—paving the way for more closed deals and a higher volume of new customers. Work on shortening your sales cycle by following these strategic steps.
1. Use Interactive Demo Software
Live demos will never disappear. They definitely have a time and a place—but have you ever had a meeting that could have been an automated demo? Adding automated demos to your channel sales strategy gives your leads the chance to experiment with your solution firsthand and self-educate using your interactive content. There are several types of automated demos you can send to buyers that will help them through every stage of the buying process.
According to our 2024 Sales Engineering Compensation and Workload report, roughly 50% of demos delivered cover the same material…which makes sense when you consider how many intro demos AEs and SEs deliver. They’re delivered so often because they happen early in the cycle when customers try to narrow down their list of vendors.
These are important demos…but that doesn’t mean they must be delivered in person. Buyers just want a broad look at your product so they can decide if they want a deeper look at your solution—but are nowhere close to making any decisions. Instead of booking repetitive calls, you can send out intro demo links that bring buyers right into your high-leverage tools and let them see the impact for themselves. These are easily automated since they’re light on product and instead focus on problems and benefits.
Even after the intro demo phases, high-quality automated demos can easily take meetings off of SE calendars and reallocate time to actually closing deals. For example, with Consensus, SEs can leverage AI capabilities to create personalized demos that respond to customer priorities and answer questions in real-time. These personalized product demos can use a buyer’s priorities to move the most important content to the beginning of a demo, capturing attention in a responsive format with AI-powered demo customization.
Not only do these demos align perfectly with whatever stage your buyer is in currently, but because they’re automated, they can be sent in between meetings, keeping deal momentum high. They’re also shareable so that internal champions can send them to other buying group members. This ensures your messaging stays on brand and helps you discover additional stakeholders earlier in the process.
Download the free Sales Cheat Sheet for Interactive Demos to access techniques for educating and qualifying buyers faster.
2. Eliminate Demo Lag Time
Demo lag time is the amount of time that passes between a customer entering their info on your site and receiving the demo. It feels like it should be an easy process: Customers fill out a form, and in a day or two, they get a demo…but the reality of demo requests is anything but.
Things have gotten so bad that buyers now have to wait, on average, six to ten business days for a demo. Lags like these have become so bad they now account for about 25% of the total time a buyer takes to decide on a solution (Gartner).
Simply removing the time it takes for buyers to see a demo could massively reduce the length of the sales cycle. Automated demos can reduce demo lag time by as much as 89% because they really do let buyers fill out a form and see a demo.
3. Reduce Unqualified Demos
Unqualified demos are another time waster. According to respondents of our SE report, 30% of all demos delivered were unqualified. That’s an insane amount of wasted hours once you realize that a 10% increase in unqualified demos is the same as adding two extra work crunch weeks to a quarter.
You can reduce the number of unqualified demos by requiring customers to view an automated demo before they qualify for live resources, which we like to call creating a Demo Qualified Lead (DQL). These demos let customers self-select what content they want to see and what they want to skip, while sellers get fed viewer insights that show what they’re watching.
4. Implement AI and Automation
Wherever possible, automate the repetitive parts of the sales process so that your sales team can focus on what they do best: closing. Some sales cycle stages can be completed without hands-on action from your sales team.
AI and automation tools mean you can:
- Send on-brand messaging at exactly the right time with automated emails
- Communicate repetitive concepts without a sales team member having the same conversation over and over using automated demos
- Follow up at the right time with automated triggers
- Craft personalized messages using AI
Use demo automation to reinforce value and give buyers a hands-on view of your solution—without the downtime of scheduling calls. Automated demos free up sales team member time to complete other high-impact tasks, all while nurturing current buyers.
5. Track Conversions Between Sales Cycle Stages
Keeping close track of relevant conversion data helps sales teams understand where buyers are falling off or where there are bottlenecks. The overall goal? Move as many qualified leads to close as possible. Work toward that goal by tracking conversions for:
- Requesting an automated demo
- Viewing a self-led demo
- Interacting with a virtual tour
- Sharing the demo with additional stakeholders
- Booking a call with a sales representative
Test different messaging and sales approaches and track the impact of each variation on your conversions. This way you can keep optimizing your sales cycle stages and maximizing win rates.
6. Ensure Team Alignment
There are few things more frustrating than approaching the end of the sales cycle with an enthusiastic buyer…only to realize that you haven’t been speaking with the true decision-maker at your target company. Early in the nurture stage, ensure there’s alignment within your buyer’s team in terms of who will make the purchasing decision and the company’s budget for a new product. Offer to speak with additional stakeholders if necessary.
A helpful hint for seeing if you’ve reached key decision-makers? Use Consensus to check if your buyer shared their self-service demo with the rest of their team. When your first point of contact experiences your demo and sees the value in your solution, they can easily spread the word. This allows internal decision-makers to use it firsthand—without having to schedule various meetings to include each stakeholder and team leader.
7. Deal with Objections Early
When you complete in-depth customer research, you can anticipate key concerns and holdups your buyers may have before investing. That means you can address those concerns proactively—before your buyers even need to ask. Make them feel like you’re reading their mind by busting those objections through your value-based selling approach.
When your buyers do pose the tough questions, address them head-on. Work through those objections with authentic conversations that prioritize their needs and pain points.
8. Personalize the Sales Cycle
No two buyers are quite alike: Each person you speak with will have different communication preferences, uncertainties, and priorities. Personalizing the sales cycle can increase marketing ROI by 10-30% and lift revenue by 5-15%, per McKinsey.
Some examples of personalization in the sales process include:
- Emails sent at a specific cadence with unique content according to the buyer’s priorities
- Personalized videos
- Demos tailored to the buyer’s top needs
- Adjusted follow-up cadence according to each buyer’s communication style and schedule
- Relevant social proof and case studies pertaining to their specific industry
Bonus tip: AI-powered demo automation allows you to personalize every demo with no extra lift for your sales team. By asking about your buyer priorities and needs at the beginning of the demo, you can use demo automation platforms like Consensus to configure a completely customized tour.
The buyer can select the features that are most important to them, then watch a self-led demo to learn about your product. Then, they can dive into your top tools in interactive tours, becoming familiar with your winning product without eating away at calendar hours for your sales team.
9. Make It Easy to Sign the Deal
Ride the momentum of a high-quality demo and a solutions-focused sales call with streamlined onboarding. Too many steps or a complicated signing process can introduce new doubts and slow down the close.
How?
- Get specific about the exact actions each party needs to take in order to close the deal and set processes in place to guide your buyer through those final steps.
- Keep contracts clean and straightforward, avoiding hidden fees or overly complex language.
- Use digital contracts and a trusted payment platform to keep signing fast and secure.
An easy closing process not only leads to more closed deals but also sets a positive tone for a long and healthy customer relationship ahead!
Shorten Your Sales Cycles with Demo Automation
No one wants a sales cycle that drags on. It’s terrible for both sellers and customers. Adding an intelligent demo platform increases your revenue team’s agility and influence by letting them create and share video demos or product tours instantly. Buyers get what they need. Sellers get buyer insights, a reduction of repetitive tasks, the ability to sell between meetings, and so much more.
To make sure you’re getting the full benefits of using demo automation, use these best practices:
- Ask customers to watch a digital demo before every meeting and encourage them to share the demo with everyone attending
- Follow up during the days leading up to the meeting to remind them to view it
- Thank them for viewing the digital demo after they watch it and start a conversation via email about what they thought
- For lower-value leads, you can take a stricter approach and require that the digital demo be viewed before the meeting with phrases like, “Can you view the digital demo before our next meeting, or would it be better if we rescheduled to give you more time?”
